Top 300 Roger Ebert Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “My favorite love scenes in movies don’t involve passion, they involve nobility or sacrifice.”

— Roger Ebert

102. “A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.”

— Roger Ebert

103. “What’s sad about not eating is the experience, whether at a family reunion or at midnight by yourself in a greasy spoon under the L tracks. The loss of dining, not the loss of food.”

— Roger Ebert

104. “Steven Spielberg makes Minority Report with the newest digital technology; other directors seem to be trying to make their movies from it.”

— Roger Ebert

105. “When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.”

— Roger Ebert

106. “And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.”

— Roger Ebert

107. “What every human being should do is eat a vegetarian diet based on whole foods. Period. That’s it. Animal protein is bad for you. Dairy is bad for you. Forget the ads: Milk and eggs are bad for you.”

— Roger Ebert

108. “Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.”

— Roger Ebert

109. “Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live.”

— Roger Ebert

110. “A truly strong woman will choose a stong man who disagrees with her over a weak one who goes along.”

— Roger Ebert

111. “Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren’t solved, they’re dealt with.”

— Roger Ebert

112. “My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.”

— Roger Ebert

113. “It amazes me that filmmakers will still film, and audiences will still watch, relationships so bankrupt of human feeling that the characters could be reading dialogue written by a computer.”

— Roger Ebert

114. “Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.”

— Roger Ebert

115. “Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.”

— Roger Ebert

116. “One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.”

— Roger Ebert

117. “No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out.”

— Roger Ebert

118. “The moment a man stops dreaming is the moment he petrifies inside.”

— Roger Ebert

119. “When a movie character is really working, we become that character. That’s what the movies offer: escapism into lives other than our own.”

— Roger Ebert

120. “Going to a movie so you won’t be offended is like eating potato chips made with Olestra; you avoid the dangers of the real thing, but your insides fill up with synthetic runny stuff.”

— Roger Ebert

121. “A young girl is possessed by a devil, and Constantine shouts, ‘I need a mirror! Now! At least three feet high!’ He can capture the demon in the mirror and throw it out the window, see, although you wonder why supernatural beings would have such low-tech security holes.”

— Roger Ebert

122. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s that you never say no to an old gypsy woman with a blind eye and leprous fingernails.”

— Roger Ebert

123. “By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.”

— Roger Ebert

124. “I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don’t remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.”

— Roger Ebert

125. “I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier that is about the best we can do.”

— Roger Ebert

126. “Yes, I was fat, but I dealt with it by simply never thinking about it. It is useful, when you are fat, to have a lot of other things to think about.”

— Roger Ebert

127. “Troy is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer, according to the credits. Homer’s estate should sue.”

— Roger Ebert

128. “James Cameron’s films have always been distinguished by ground-breaking technical excellence.”

— Roger Ebert

129. “Of that one, I wrote: “Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.”

— Roger Ebert

130. “Well, we’re all dying in increments. I don’t mind people knowing what I look like, but I don’t want them thinking I’m dying.”

— Roger Ebert

131. “It’s strange: We leave the movie having enjoyed its conclusion so much that we almost forgot our earlier reservations. But they were there, and they were real.”

— Roger Ebert

132. “I’m told we movie critics praise movies that are long and boring.”

— Roger Ebert

133. “It’s a good question, because a movie isn’t good or bad based on its politics. It’s usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.”

— Roger Ebert

134. “Sometimes it’s all about the casting.”

— Roger Ebert

135. “When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.”

— Roger Ebert

136. “People trying to be funny are never as funny as people trying to be serious and failing.”

— Roger Ebert

137. “Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.”

— Roger Ebert

138. “You slide down in your seat and make yourself comfortable. On the screen in front of you, the movie image appears – enormous and overwhelming. If the movie is a good one, you allow yourself to be absorbed in its fantasy, and its dreams become part of your memories.”

— Roger Ebert

139. “In Blue Crush, we meet three Hawaiian surfers who work as hotel maids, live in a grotty rental, and are raising the kid sister of one of them. Despite this near-poverty, they look great; there is nothing like a tan and a bikini to overcome class distinctions.”

— Roger Ebert

140. “Dirty Love wasn’t written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn’t rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.”

— Roger Ebert

141. “When I had been a film critic for ten minutes, I treated Doris Day as a target for cheap shots. I have learned enough to say today that the woman was remarkably gifted.”

— Roger Ebert

142. “The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.”

— Roger Ebert

143. “Dogs notice, they share, they draw conclusions, they like it when they’re able to be of service and are touchingly grateful when they’re praised.”

— Roger Ebert

144. “The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.”

— Roger Ebert

145. “Wes Anderson’s mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.”

— Roger Ebert

146. “I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.”

— Roger Ebert

147. “It’s like the high school production of something you saw at Steppenwolf, with the most gifted students in drama class playing the John Malkovich and Joan Allen roles.”

— Roger Ebert

148. “Exhilarating. Radical Grace moved me to tears with its portrayal of good people putting their beliefs into action in ways that transcend all ideological boundaries.”

— Roger Ebert

149. “In thinking about ‘depressing movies,’ many people don’t realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.”

— Roger Ebert

150. “Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.”

— Roger Ebert